As a lawyer, I always hated commuting and schlepping around a heavy laptop computer in my briefcase. So, I went out and bought a small, lightweight Asus Eee PC 701 and it has been an excellent companion at the office, at court, and on the commute.
After a month or two of using my Asus Eee PC, I felt like spreading my wings. I wanted to get away from the default interface, and the forums and wiki over at EeeUser helped me to unlock the hidden Xandros linux desktop that is included by default on the EeePC.
While Xandros is a great linux distro, it is limited in its functionality. Security updates are few and far between, and the software repositories were lacking. Additionally, support from the community was extremely lacking and I didn't want to pay for support. What I really wanted to do was install a powerful modern distro like Ubuntu.
After using John Ramvi’s customized version of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Eee for a few months, I was frustrated that things weren't working properly. There were lots of tweaks that needed to be made, like mounting usb drives, enabling repositories and security updates, and getting wi-fi working properly. Plus the tabbed netbook interface got to me. I needed a fully functional distro.
The answer to my prayers was Eeebuntu. It is easy to install via usb stick and is fully functional out of the box. I use the standard edition, but the netbook version is supposedly very good as well.
There are lots of other distos you can use on your Asus or desktop computer. You can find them out about almost any linux distro on Distrowatch. Personally, I am a huge fan of their weekly magazine, Distrowatch Weekly, which is an opinion column about the current happenings in the world of Linux.
Another excellent resource for Linux happenings is Tuxmachines.
Some other great general computer resources are Maximum PC, Phronix, Reddit and Slashdot.
Hope this gets you started on your linux journey!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment